Around the House and Anniversary

When we were hanging around the house, I was doing a lot of this:

and this:

I had so so much fun playing with my baby niece. If only she and her parents didn't live so far away!

Ed wasn't getting at much time with her as I was, and he mentioned that he'd enjoy giving her a bottle, so the next time she needed one, she was all his. 

Of course, she chose this time to be super wiggly and distracted, and Ed didn't have the peaceful bottle experience that I usually get to experience.

Still, the picture below has to be one of my all time favorites of Ed.

Another one of our activities while we were up here was painting birdhouses.  A long time ago, we had all painted birdhouses for my parents' backyard, and my mom and dad decided it was time for a new installment.

Ed and I decided to go with a bay area themed birdhouse - Ed planned the design and I carried it out. On the front and back we did the bridge towers. On this side, you can (hopefully) tell that it's the San Francisco skyline with fog (and perhaps the forests of the marin headlands in the foreground?).

The other side is supposed to be mount tam, though geographically that doesn't exactly make sense with the golden gate. Oh well, it still looks pretty. 

We're proud of our creation and are looking forward to seeing it up the next time we visit.

Our last afternoon, we played some very fun games of ping pong in the garage. We used to play this all the time as kids, and, as a family, we are very silly when it comes to this game. We were almost constantly laughing. What made it even more fun was that Amelia was out there watching and was getting such a kick out of seeing us play (and laugh). She was giggling up a storm and just having a great time watching us - she was totally amused for almost 45 minutes of ping pong playing!

After that heavy excursion, I read some on the beautiful deck as I soaked in the last afternoon. 

That night, Ed and I celebrated our real first anniversary, and went out for margaritas (very fancy :) ). I forgot to mention earlier, but my parents gifted Ed and I (and also my sister and her husband, whose anniversary is a year and a day before ours) with a stay at a place of our choosing and a dinner out. We're saving it for my birthday, but that means that the celebration of our anniversary will continue into September!

As we drove down the mountain to the restaurant,  we were gifted with a beautiful sunset over the lake on our drive down from the cabin.

Then, we just got to enjoy relaxing in each other's company. Can you tell which drink was mine and which one was Ed's? The only sad part was that the place we ended up at closed pretty early, so our evening date wasn't as long as I would have liked. 

Still, it was nice to have a little bit of a celebration, in preview of our real one at home later. 

And, that was basically the end of our trip! 

Before I finish these recaps, I would be remiss if I didn't share some more pictures of the beautiful cabin.

Our lovely room downstairs (especially awesome because of the plastered walls - why? see below)

The bunk beds, where my sister Kortney slept.

Now, one thing I didn't mention that was pretty funny, was the extra visitors who shared the cabin with us. If you know me in real life, you might know that when I was younger (and a little still today), I was petrified of flying insects and, especially, moths. Right after we arrived at the cabin, my parents informed me that the cabin had a "little" issue with them - as in, the cabin was infested and, come nightfall, hundreds would, quite literary, come out of the woodwork. That first night, we went for a hike, and when we came back, the 20 foot tall windows were completely coated with moths, hundreds and hundreds of moths. 

(Source) Sadly, I didn't take any pictures. So, imagine this, but about triple the moths per square foot, and you have some idea. Keep in mind twenty foot ceilings, with the windows spanning probably 15 feet wide. 

While it was certainly overwhelming to see so many at once, I happily discovered that they didn't necessarily bother me that much more than they bothered everyone else. However, when we briefly tried to turn on the overhead lights and the moths took flight en masse, I was a little bothered, but so long as they stayed on the windows we were good. 

My dad tried a new method to deal with them (that Ed and I had actually previously used on flies in our house) - sucking them up with the hose of a vaccuum cleaner. This worked surprisingly well, and the next nights, the showing was much much smaller (though my sister and her husband didn't completely believe our claims since they didn't seem them). My dad found sucking up the critters pretty satisfying and the rest of the nights, he would want to get up every few minutes to do moth control. The moths really liked the tv and would like to crawl around on the screen while we watched movies, which was pretty funny sometimes, if a little distracting. 

There was also another creature who we heard of but didn't officially know was there until the end of the trip. The last morning I asked my mom how she slept and she responded by saying that, "he didn't tell me, but your father has apparently known for some time that the bat in the house has been living in our room!" Apparently the night before, she had awoken to the sound of wings flapping and gliding through the bedroom air (possibly in pursuit of the moths). 

So, for these reasons, I was thrilled that we were in a plaster walled room that Ed could check for any manner of flying creatures before we went to bed. 

The next morning, as we drove down the mountain and back home, we were treated with some lovely views as our last memories of the this trip.